Picturing Utopia: Bertha Shambaugh And The Amana Photographers

Picturing Utopia: Bertha Shambaugh and the Amana Photographers

More than 100 years ago, Bertha Shambaugh set out to photograph the Amana Colonies, the utopian religious community twenty miles northwest of Iowa City. Shambaugh brought to her project a clear social mission to tell the world mired in the upheavals of the 1890s about a kinder way of life. She easily won the trust of the community and began publishing photographs and articles about the society she so admired. Soon after, several Amana members ignored their community's prohibition on photography and took up cameras to record the people and events around them.Picturing Utopia: Bertha Shambaugh and the Amana Photographers celebrates their artistic vision and offers a rare glimpse into a nineteenth-century religious utopia. Abigail Foerstner brings together this stunning collection of photographs along with the stories of the photographers who took them. Together the pictures and text fill in an untold chapter of American photographic history and provide an insider's view of life in Amana.The photographs, preserved on glass plate negatives, provide an unbroken photographic record beginning with Shambaugh's work in the 1890s and continuing through the Colonies' transition to mainstream American life with the Great Change in 1932.From BooklistFoerstner recounts the story of the photographers of the Amana colonies, a utopian religious community in Iowa, during the 1890s and the early years of the twentieth century. In particular, she celebrates the inspirational career of Bertha Shambaugh, one of the earliest social documentary photographers and the first outsider to photograph the colonies. Other photographers represented include Christian Herrmann, Paul Kellenberger, Rudolph Kellenberger, F. William Miller, William F. Noe, Friedrich Oehl, Jacob and Henrietta Selzer, Peter Stuck, and the author's great-uncle William Foerstner. The photographs' subject matter is the stuff of ordinary life: children and adults at work and play, seasonal celebrations, the interiors of old Amana churches, empty schoolhouse benches. Intimate and warm, the text evokes in style and tone the elegiac quality of the photographs. The mood of the whole book is best captured by the image of a pair of oval-shaped, dark-rimmed glasses resting on an open Bible and illuminated by a shaft of light from above. This is a rare glimpse of a nineteenth-century utopian religious society, which is to say a unique document of a vanished way of life. June SawyersReview"A wonderful book and a fascinating story. Abigail Foerstner recovers an important piece of heretofore lost American photographic history." -- John Wood, author of America and the Daguerreotype"A wonderful selection of photographs and an insightful account of one of America's great utopian societies. All those interested in photography and American history will find this book an invaluable addition to their library." -- Sylvia Wolf, Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography, Whitney Museum of American Art"Like a time machine, the photographs in Picturing Utopia carry us back to a wondrous Iowa experiment in creating a kinder, more spiritual way of life. I recommend this book to all who are overwhelmed by the complexities of modern-day living." -- Jon Anderson, Chicago Tribune"This is a gem of a book. It is not only rare documentation of a nineteenth-century religious utopia but one of the heart as well. . . . Thanks to Abigail Foerstner and the prescience of those few photographers, like Bertha Shambaugh, with their cumbersome glass plate cameras, we are able to be in the presence of the Amanas once again. Take time to look carefully at these photographs, for they afford us the opportunity of a continuing dialogue; an insight into the lives of a community which strove to achieve an ideal and harmonious way of life, something so evidently in disarray today." -- David PlowdenAbout the AuthorAbigail Foerstner has written hundreds of articles on art and photography for the Chicago